Union Update: Free Update Highlights in Version 1.5

Prepare for fire, smoke and ash: in just a few days, on April 30th, the “Prophecies of Ash” DLC releases on all platforms. Settle Cinis, the largest island in Anno’s history, turn it into your new capital in Latium – and endure the moods of the volcano, bringing both destruction as well as powerful buffs.

Alongside the DLC, we’re releasing Patch 1.5, again including a variety of changes, improvements and bug fixes. While the full patch notes will be released on Wednesday, today we walk you through some of the changes and quality-of-life improvements that are included in this update as well.

Please keep the feedback coming – more adjustments and improvements are already planned for future updates, including (as mentioned last week) much-requested features like note-taking and the mod browser.

Big Changes

We’re starting with some larger changes that are worth providing some more details on:

• Passive Trade rebalance: was too powerful previously and now gets adjusted downwards a bit.
  • Rivals/Traders only sell goods they actually have in stock
  • Rivals pay the same price as traders now
  • Rivals/Traders have less budget for trading starting in mid-game
  • Goods have higher trade prices
  • Important: the old balancing is still available, and all these options are now part of the game setup. While old savegames can migrate to the new balancing if you want, you can also pick and choose how you want to set up passive trade in your savegame.
  • “Prophecies of Ash” DLC: during volcano phases, traders will not sell goods impacted by volcano phases (food, crops, fish, animals)
• Word filter adjusted in singleplayer
  • While the filter is still in place (mandatory requirement), there’s no more censoring on client side
  • Other participants in a multiplayer match will still see ***** if a word another player used is affected by the filter
• Various Trade Route screen improvements
  • Assign route to a group during creation
  • Give trade route a name directly during creation
  • Hold shift to copy a good across all vacant slots of a ship
  • Trade route lines are now displayed on the map on the right when hovering over a trade route
  • The number of buildings producing a good is now displayed in addition to the stock level for each island
  • Some more improvements are still in discussion/in development

Small changes

In addition, plenty of smaller changes and improvements have been added, including (but not limited to) the following:

• It’s now possible to zoom & pan the mini-map
• Amphitheatre events can now be run on multiple islands simultaneously
• Weather effects like rain in Albion or the volcanic ash rain from Prophecies of Ash can be disabled via the options menu
• Destroyed Officia remember slotted specialists
• We’ve added a “Favourite” category when using gamepad
  • It allows you to add ships, buildings as favourite for quick-access
  • You can add both menu entries and your current selection
• Gameplay DLC can now be activated at any point while playing
  • When loading a pre-DLC-release savegame, a prompt will appear, but the decision can be postponed to later
• Added a workforce priority system to help with avoiding negative spirals
  • The priority now is: Military < adding population < population area effect < income < income area effect
• Defeating a pirate now gives positive emperor reputation
• When using mouse & keyboard, all pins at bottom of the screen can now be removed/replaced, the resource pins are not fixed anymore
• Water mill gets +1 knowledge, donkey mill –1 health as area effect
  • to better represent the water mill being more “expensive” due to requiring a river slot
• Many many visual quality improvements on the UI side, including:
  • Ingame/pause menu
  • Save & load menu
  • Building menus
  • General HUD

Patch Notes and release

Again, please note the list above is not exhaustive: these and other improvements will be added to the game on Thursday! Stay tuned for the full patch notes, to be published on April 27th, for a list of all changes as well as bug fixes that are part of the update.

This update will release alongside the “Prophecies of Ash” DLC for Anno 117: Pax Romana on the 30th at 10 ATM UTC (all platforms except Steam, where it’s releasing at 6PM UTC).